A weekend in the Harz, and the campsites you can't book online

It is not my place to complain, and I did not. My two wanted a long weekend in the Harz. She had wanted to see it for years: the beech woods, the granite crags, the towns of crooked half-timbered houses, the little steam train that climbs the Brocken through the mist. She spent a morning at the kitchen table with the Vacamp map, and the map, I am sorry to say, had nothing to tell her. There were campsites everywhere, and not one of them would say whether it had room. So she wrote to the Vacamp people and told them.

The Vacamp people looked. Of the 231 campsites in the region, Vacamp could read live availability for three. She had not been unlucky. The map really was that empty.

← Not me. Older. Lovely spot, though.

What followed, I understand, was a great deal of work. The Vacamp team opened every one of those websites and followed anything that looked like a way to book, “Buchen”, “Reservierung”, “Anfrage”, up to eight pages deep. Wherever a booking system turned up that Vacamp did not yet know, the team taught Vacamp to read it. The team were thorough in the way I most admire, which is quietly.

At the end of it, three had become eight.

There was simply nothing more to read. Most of those campsites take no bookings online at all. Instead there is a telephone number, an email address, sometimes a price list in a PDF, and a good many have no website whatsoever. Several of the booking forms that do exist turn out to be enquiries: you send your dates, and someone writes back on Monday.

Which brings me to the point, if I may. Vacamp can only be as good as the campsites let it be. It can read any booking system that is there to be read, and it will learn the ones it doesn't know yet. But where the booking happens on the telephone, or in a guest book, or at a window by the gate, the map stays dark, and no amount of effort on the Vacamp side will light it.

It is a pity, because the Harz deserves better. Finding a pitch there for Saturday ought to be as simple as it is in much of the Netherlands, where many campsites show their free pitches online. The same is true of a good many other lovely corners of Europe, whose campsites still live on the telephone and are missed by the very people who would most like to stay.

If you run a campsite and take your bookings by telephone, the Vacamp team would very much like to hear why, at support@vacamp.ai. Vacamp takes no commission and sells nothing to campsites. It would simply like to show your free pitches to the people looking for one.

My two went anyway, as it happens. He drove to the first campsite that looked as though it might take a vehicle of my length, and came back eleven minutes later with a pitch, a map of the walks drawn in biro, and the name of the owner's dog. We stayed three nights. He rode the steam train to the top of the Brocken and came back damp and delighted. She walked up through the beech woods to a granite crag and sat there until the light had gone out of the valley.

I should like, next time, for her to find it from the kitchen table.

With every good wish,
Oliver

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